


Acid Betty and the Kiss of Death

by Mistressaq



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: Character Study, Horror, Mutant Powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 08:27:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13609473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mistressaq/pseuds/Mistressaq
Summary: What if drag names were more like... mutant names? What if Acid Betty... killed people?





	Acid Betty and the Kiss of Death

They called her Acid Betty because of her attitude. At least that's what she told them.

She didn’t date because other people were fickle. At least that's what she told them. 

Her hookups were confused when she told them she didn’t kiss on the lips. Don't currently have mouth herpes, don’t want mouth herpes. 

At least that’s what she told them. 

It was all comforting half-truths she told others. But there was only so long she could go without human interaction, only so long without the skin-on-skin contact that every human craves. She’d tried to tell herself that she didn’t need anyone. Because she wasn’t human.

Wishful thinking. 

At some point she stopped caring about fitting in. She started using her… _quirks_ to her advantage. 

Acid Betty had a theory that the second-oldest occupation, after selling your body, was the selling of unique skills. 

The first occupation was sold on Craigslist. Betty’s sold on the deep web. 

Her first client was an heiress with daddy issues and an eye on her inheritance. For six grand, Betty got into Daddy’s big house by posing as a nurse. Daddy was a sickly man and Betty had a way with chemicals. 

He picked up on her heavy footfalls. “You’re new,” he’d said in the dithery voice of a dying man. Betty heard it and wondered why her client couldn’t just wait till the old man kicked the bucket. 

But she wasn’t being paid to think. “Nurse Smalls called out sick, I’m afraid,” she hissed. She could see apprehension cross the old man’s face. He didn’t trust her. But he needed her to change the dressings on the sores of his calves. They were open and leaking blood and lymph all of the time. Vestiges of some long-gone war that never left his mind or body. They would never fully heal.

Betty sat on the side of his bed, placing a hand over his right kneecap. The old man winced. “My sores.”

Betty clucked. “Poor baby,” she mocked. 

He stiffened, his danger sense jumping from yellow to red. Adrenaline flooded his veins. But he was old and frail. He couldn’t fight; his muscles had atrophied. He couldn’t flee; his legs were as useful as an appendix. He tried to tried to build up a scream around the emphysema in his lungs. 

Betty pressed a finger to his cracked and scum-clotted lips. “Shhh, you insignificant husk.”

He stilled with fear and offense.

She outlined his pale lips with her fingernail, painted a radioactive green. Maybe he would have appreciated the irony if it were not for the glaucoma. 

“Can I tell you a secret?” she whispered. 

He couldn’t respond. Fear was acrid in his throat.

She was leaning over him, arching her back, bringing her face closer to his own where it rested on his sterile white pillow. “I haven’t kissed anybody in twelve years.”

She continued in a low hum, as if singing a baby to sleep. “Sounds odd, doesn’t it? But you understand the last boy I kissed was Freddie the neighbor boy. We were playing sardines and I was in his hidey-hole with him. A crawlspace, as I recall. One of those little places only children can find. We were together, very much like this,” she hum-laughed. The sound sent a fresh line of gooseflesh down the man’s neck. 

“It seemed the thing to do,” she continued. “So I stole a quick one.” 

Betty pecked the man on the lips. 

“Just like that… it was all giggles for a good… ten seconds.” She stood up from the bed and walked to the window. “Then the screaming started.”

The old man in the bed felt a tingling sensation around his mouth, like when he used to eat spicy food and felt the capsaicin trickery work on his cells. The longer he waited, the stronger the feeling got. 

From the window, Betty saw the spacious grounds of the mansion. A confused family of deer thinking the topiary garden was a natural hangout place for their kind. “In a short while, the screaming stopped… so did his breathing.”

The old man’s breath caught in his throat. He tried to cough -- dislodge the issue. Something was wrong.

Betty kept talking. “Turns out there is a chemical component contained in my saliva that is a neurotoxin, apparently much like that of hemlock. The thing is, hemlock takes hours to show symptoms. Mine kills in minutes.”

Black spots pulsed around his vision, chased by Christmas tinsel.

Betty kept talking. “The head chemist kept trying to figure me out, right? Testing, testing, testing, all the while I was in a white padded room.” She chuckled, an eerie sound to the man’s stressed ears. “Oh, if I wasn’t crazy when I went in there, I sure as fuck was when I came out!”

She paced back around to the other side of the old man’s bed. “And do you know what I learned when I came out? Freddie wasn’t just dead from a hemlockian neurotoxin, right? That wasn’t it!” The old man’s mouth opened and closed like a beached fish. “His face, right? His face? Melted. Coroner said it looked like he’d got an entire bucket of fucking battery acid dropped on him!” she cackled. “Do you realize that when they find your body nobody’s gonna be able to identify your corpse? You won’t have any face left!”

She laughed.

She laughed.

Her client got her inheritance.

Acid Betty got the rest of her money.

She moved to someplace different. Her name was Acid Betty. Acid because of her attitude.

That’s what she told them.

But she knew the truth.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written last summer during a stint of writers block. TBH I just had fun with this one.


End file.
